Reation To "Supersize Me"

It is, more than ever, evident that we live in a very diverse, and often opposite, country. The “information age”, as they like to call it, has given us the ability to access opinions more than ever. Movies – Hollywood blockbusters to your Youtube minute spot – and the internet have given us the ability to capture lots of opinions quickly and effectively. A teenager in Maine can read the thoughts of an elderly woman in California with the simple click of a mouse. Better than ever, we’ve been able to capture the opinions of the mass population, and have been able to compare based on different categories – some politically correct and some not so much. Of course, this surplus of information, as many dictators will attest, creates lots of controversy. Is there more peace in limited information or surplus information? That is the battle that many developing countries are facing right now. But, of course, that is another topic. The point I’m trying to make is that the increased public knowledge has deepened controversies, led to thicker tensions, and pushed the extremes of each argument. Nowhere is it more evident then in the controversies surrounding Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me.
The biggest controversy surrounding Supersize Me is the cut-off point between companies’ responsibility and personal responsibility. In the movie none of the McDonald’s food had any sort of nutritional facts on them. In addition, most of the stores either didn’t have a nutritional fact chart or had it hidden away somewhere. In addition, the movie was being produced amiss numerous lawsuits where obese people had sued McDonalds because they had become so overweight, claiming that McDonald’s responsibility to prevent them from becoming so unhealthy. I find this to be completely ridiculous. It is simply outlandish to blame companies for your erroneous decisions. I can only imagine how baffling our society is to immigrants or tourists from other countries. I remember when I came to America in 2001 after living in Africa for almost all of my life. I was completely baffled by the oddities of American society and the fast food industry, in particular the “Pokemon” craze at Burger King. Imagine my complete dumbfounded surprise at this cultural phenomena – fresh off of eating a home-cooked meal every night in a third-world country to oiled, unhealthy food spurred by advertising scenarios that featured catch lines such as “Catch ‘Em All!” It wasn’t, however, the fast food franchises that surprised me, but rather the number of people who flocked to them regularly for meals. These very people consumed whatever the fast food industries gave them, including the “happy meals”. One of my earliest memories of America is the controversy surrounding the red and white “Pokemon” balls the kids were given. Apparently, kids had been eating them, so they were discontinued. Did it really take Burger King’s leverage to convince people that eating a plastic ball the size of your hand is not a good idea? How self-unreliant are we? This scenario isn’t much different from the lawsuits over obesity. Does it really take a pronounced warning from a fast food chain that eating too much food, of any kind is unhealthy and can lead to obesity? I’ve heard the arguments that before Supersize Me came out, many Americans didn’t know how unhealthy fast food was. Please, I knew that when I was 9, fresh off of living in a country with few restaurants of any kind. Companies shouldn’t be responsible for our common sense (or lack thereof). Should I jump off the roof off my house and then sue the people who built it? I do agree that restaurants and food companies should be responsible for labeling the nutritional facts of their food for people who suffer from diseases such as diabetes that need to know that kind of information, but the label (or lack thereof) on food should not replace one’s common sense regarding how much food they eat. It is simply atrocious how irresponsible and unwilling American people are to blame themselves for making bad choices about their food consumption.
Another big controversy surrounding Supersize Me was the perceived extremity of Morgan Spurlock’s experiment. Critics of the movie state that people should know that eating fast food for every meal and getting very little exercise is unhealthy. Obviously, the critics failed to observe the truth of Spurlock’s experiment – the scenarios surrounding his experiment are very similar to the scenarios surrounding many Americans. It’s almost as if the critics of the movie are denying America has an obesity problem. Certainly the movie may not apply to you or most of the people you hang out with, but you can’t deny that it does apply to numerous Americans.
Morgan Spurlock’s movie points out the obvious, but not the obvious the critics think. The movie points out that Americans, as free people, should clearly be responsible for themselves. To be otherwise is to trivialize the values of freedom and independence we so endear. I hope the direction we are taking is not divergent to the difficult road we have taken get to where we are.